Friday, 14 June 2013

Smoke and mist and Judith Rooze

By mist I mean something natural; that thins or parts or deepens further, something through which a shifting truth is glimpsed with joy, understanding - or spotted with fear. Mist: breathable, water going by in a cloak.

By smoke I mean man-made smoke, complex molecules conjured for reasons obscure, yet emanating from single, explicable source. Clever to make, not clever to breathe. When you've blown it all away you're looking at a shell. By the time you get what it is you can't use it any more.

That's good, isn't it? Mist and smoke. The last-minute digression into modern art is unexpected but usefully implies that the smoke/mist analogy can and should extend beyond poetry to all arts. I think he's right, and have been mentally allocating writers and artists to each category.

Damien Hirst's work - to settle on a lazy example - seems to me to be not just smoke but a choking smog. His art (which was at one time excitingly zeitgeisty) has degenerated into humdrum production-line tat - devoid of wit, skill, invention or interest - and functions as nothing more than an investment opportunity for ugly oligarchs. Such works may have a high value (although even that seems to have peaked) but little or no worth.

On the other hand, a young artist I bumped into at the Slade MA graduate show last week struck me as the real deal and (this is no exaggeration) a Hockney-in-waiting - a painter who knows how to paint, who has confidence and skill and colour-sense and an expanding, generous, quick-witted imagination. She's making discoveries and (I hope) lots of mistakes. Her work has the qualities of mist cited by Glyn Maxwell, and it's refreshingly breathable - images of cyclists and heads of Zeus, shagpile coats, blinged-up Doric columns and a spectral hand groping a big bum (below). She comes from Ghent, her name is Judith Rooze and she is, I think, a talent to watch.